THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS: A novel
Ruth Ozeki
[Viking, 560 pages]
This is a modern reading experience that speaks to deeper truths and Buddhist philosophy as a gift.
Ruth Ozeki has written a novel for fans of beautiful and engaging storytelling who enjoy likable, flawed characters and would like to have their prose steeped in Buddhist philosophy. It’s also for those who love to have their minds messed with in the best possible way.
The Book of Form and Emptiness, her most recent novel, has been nominated for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Three major characters
We’re introduced to three major characters: First, there’s Benny Oh, a teen who has lost his father in a tragic accident and begins to hear objects speaking to him. He is labelled as having schizoaffective disorder. Is that true? Maybe, or perhaps he’s simply a sensitive soul who can channel the objects around him and give them voice.
His mother is Annabelle, who holds onto objects desperately and becomes a hoarder. Her collected objects speak to her, too, just in a different way. Finally, there’s the Book, which just wants to be written and read. Yes, you read that correctly: The Book is a major character. Snarky, wise and philosophical to boot.
This is a novel about objects and their people, and people and their objects. We impose meaning on objects, or we think we do. But what if objects also impose their meaning on us? It’s a two-way street. They’re our devices, and we’re theirs. We need each other.
Is Benny writing the Book or is the Book writing Benny? Sometimes, while reading, I didn’t know what was really happening and what was illusory.
A wonderful cast of supporting characters
The cast of supporting characters here is wonderful. The Aleph is a teen artist who is also homeless and addicted, and is friends with The Bottleman, an old, wheelchair-bound Slavic homeless poet. Benny’s safe place is the local library, and they befriend him there, where they all hang out frequently. As Benny struggles with the voices he hears, the old poet charges Benny to find a philosophical question to test if he is truly mad:
“But that’s the PROBLEM!” Benny wailed, clapping his hands over his ears. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not!”
“Yes!” the old man exclaimed. “Precisely! Now you hef your question!”
”I do?”
“Most certainly,” the Bottleman said. “A good question. Very philosophical.”
“What is it?”
“Vat is real?”
“But I told you, I don’t know what’s real!”
“Of course not! That is what mekks it an excellent question.”
Even as Benny spends time trying to answer his question—what is real?—his voices give agency to the objects around him, making them characters in this story, too. Here, scissors want to stab, bats want to hit, boots are made for walking and vacuum cleaners want to clean. After being beaten up one evening, Benny finds the Aleph and the Bottleman at the library. He tells the Bottleman:
“Our vacuum cleaner at home doesn’t want to clean,” he said. “It’s never wanted to clean. It doesn’t suck.”
“Sad,” the old man said. “A vacuum that doesn’t suck hes lost its raison d’etre. A boot that kicks a boy hes lost its moral compass.”
Exuberance and metta
I found the tone of this book to be exuberant. Even when sad things were happening, even when there was trauma on the page, one felt safe. I think it’s because the message is to wake up to the fact that we’re all connected, not isolated beings suffering on our own. Everyone and everything here, even the most minor characters, are held by Ozeki and written by the Book, with great kindness.
Kindness makes me think about Metta. Metta is a Pali word that means loving-kindness, goodwill or friendliness. It’s one of the four “sublime states” cultivated in Buddhism, and it’s quite a beautiful concept, along with having practical uses. I’ve made friends with Metta by focusing on the notion of friendliness and kindness, and I’m trying to approach others and the world with this lens. It’s hard, sometimes!
Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest, ordained in 2010, so perhaps it’s not surprising that The Book of Form and Emptiness felt imbued with Metta, as if the whole tome was bathed in it. Because the Book is a character, I sometimes felt as if I was holding Metta in my hands, even if it was just a library book. Weird but wonderful. This made the reading experience quite lovely.
Ozeki writes of an experience that Benny has at one point while sitting alone in the library, where it seems that he’s becoming mentally unglued… but the Book narrates this scene and calls this being Unbound. We might call it the realization that everything is connected:
“How impossible it is to put into words this infinitude of the Unbound! In a single instant we witnessed constellations on the brink of constellating, assemblages in flux. We perceived the dynamic flow of vibrant matter, materializing as a marble or a baseball bat, a sneaker or a story, a jazz riff or a viral contagion, an ovum or an antique spoon. … In this Unbound state that night you encountered all that was and ever could be: form and emptiness, and the absence of form and emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in.”
Words need boundaries
I’d love to talk about form and emptiness as a Buddhist concept here, but I think I’m going to leave it be, because I don’t totally understand it, and even superficial research on the topic produces pages-long complexities. Also, if I wrote about everything the book made me ponder, this review would probably go on far, far too long.
As one character notes near the end of the Book, when talking about words, “They need boundaries. Without some discipline and constraint, they can just go and say anything they please.” Ah, words. They just want to be written. And I’d love to write more and more about The Book of Form and Emptiness, but I’ll contain myself and simply encourage you to read it yourself.
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